Best Practice XPM Setup Every Firm should use

Most accounting firms use Xero Practice Manager (XPM) for time, jobs, and billing.

But very few use it as the operating system for their entire firm.

That’s not because XPM isn’t capable. It’s because most firms never set it up in a way that reflects how they actually work.

At Rechargly, we recently hosted a webinar with Amy Holdsworth (Clarity Street) and Ben Barker (AccountKit) to explore what a best-practice XPM setup looks like, the kind that gives you full visibility across workflow, profitability, and WIP without drowning in admin.

In this blog, we share key takeaways from that conversation, including the setup decisions that matter most and how to keep your XPM data clean and useful.

Yes, you can run your entire firm on XPM. The key is keeping it simple and consistent.

This blog is based on a recent webinar. If you’d rather watch, here’s the recording.

Why most firms struggle to get value from XPM

If you’ve ever felt like XPM creates more confusion than clarity, you’re not alone.

Amy has spent more than 15 years implementing XPM for firms of every size. She’s seen the same mistakes over and over: too many job states, overbuilt templates, and complicated naming conventions that make reporting almost impossible.

“XPM does everything you need it to do,” Amy explained. “It just doesn’t do everything well if you make it too complex.”

The root issue is that most firms try to make XPM track everything. Every task, every workflow nuance, every client interaction. The result is a bloated system that no one trusts.

Ben agreed that when XPM becomes too heavy, people stop updating it. Then the data becomes unreliable, and reporting loses meaning.

That’s why simplicity is at the heart of every best-practice setup. The first question to ask isn’t how much you can track, but what you actually need XPM to show you.

Choosing your structure: one job or many?

Amy said this is the biggest decision you’ll make in XPM, and it defines how you’ll experience everything else.

If you use one job per client, per year, you get a clean, simple structure. You can see profitability at the client level, track WIP easily, and reconcile billing faster.

But you lose visibility on workflow. It’s harder to see what’s in progress, who’s doing what, or which tasks are overdue.

If you use multiple jobs per client such as separate jobs for BAS, year-end, FBT, and advisory, you gain that day-to-day visibility. You can track workloads, assign jobs more accurately, and manage deadlines.

The trade-off is that profitability becomes less clear because costs and time are spread across multiple jobs.

Amy summarised it best:

“You can’t have perfect workflow visibility and perfect profitability reporting. You have to pick which one matters most right now.”

Her rule of thumb:

• Small firms (1–2 staff): one annual job per client is simpler and cleaner.
• Growing firms (3+ staff): multiple jobs per client help manage accountability and workflow.

Neither is right or wrong. What matters is committing to one approach and sticking with it.

Building job templates that work in practice

Job templates are meant to create structure, but in most firms, they do the opposite.

Amy sees firms with templates so detailed that staff spend more time updating XPM than doing the work itself.

Her advice is to keep templates short and high-level. For example, your annual accounts job might only need five key steps: Prepare, Do, Review, Complete, and Send to Client.

“You can spend days trying to build the perfect template,” Amy said. “But the perfect one is the one people actually use.”

Ben added that templates should help teams standardise, not micromanage. If staff need detailed instructions, that belongs in a training manual, not in XPM.

The goal is to reduce friction. When the system is easy to follow, teams keep it up to date.

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